It was winter, cold and silent. The forest was new pine, not old at all. Land cleared within some small number of years ago. I was young and cold. It was ecstatic.

A branch broke, with it silence. The sound, coming and going was singular. Rather than filling the well of memory, the well opened wide. It yawned. Time disappeared. Good riddance.

I have only landscapes now, punctuated by violence.

You are here to hear a story, though aren't you?

I always liked blades, even as a child. The pure ability to separate things with a fine edge excited my mind. I spent a lot of time making things sharper. I have heard that glass is the sharpest thing to form. Broken it works just fine, no sharpening required.

It wasn't enough to cut the first one, not enough at all. I had to have more. I ate his heart and his liver, not because of some naïve idea that I could possess his power but that it seemed right to do. I was twelve. The child of the pines was gone.

They came after me, of course. Have you ever thought that coursing is a way to go forward? Mindless, like gnats. It troubles me, the swarming outrage. Insects protecting the hive. The fat matron wielding a butcher's knife. It made the transition complete. There was no back.

The asylum sat high on the hill above the moors, the sounds from the windows were perfect. Company every time I passed. I was young and in love.

Some have accused me of being a predator. I suppose I was that day, when they came for me. Like lambs to slaughter. Over all these years I have marveled at the willingness to seek death. As if it was hardwired. All under the walls where the mad were interred. Blood on snow. Like red pearls fading to black.

You can wrap destiny around anything you want. You can fear it, or other.

I wrote my death along time ago, and it was singular. As all deaths are. This particular death was to the roaring of pines. It was a good death. Angus brought me there as only he could. On the pine needles I saw the roaring sea. Blake's sea, final and extravagant in cresting black water.

He was my friend. Color is light's answer to the void. Orange pine needles, pale scars around his ruined eye. What he didn't see, I was.

He called me a poet once. Few in words, he said. Absinthe didn't have friends. Only the love of the void. He loved the contrast though too. Color and shining, fireflies and the bright dull of dying leaves. When he asked me to end the Asylum, to effect his escape, it was rust on the barbed wire that made him fascinated. He loved the color of decay in the metal. We strung it everywhere.

It wasn't escape for him, it was all journey.

He was friend. I killed him in a forest of pines, dropped him forty feet from a fucking tree. He thanked me. I always did what he asked. Not out of some sense of being led. But that it always seemed right. He had that sense, of what would seem right to me. Maybe I was led, but blood without end, well, it resonated.

He had set himself up, as a demon of the forest, taking children at night, leaving small tokens of their flesh. Solitary in the pines between sojourns. He knew it was final. That it had devolved. No longer demon of the battlefield, of the cities.

They went after the demon of the forest, the villagers, and they died. Armed as best the could with their wives plaintive cries behind them, they died. Some of the stupid fuckers even carried pitchforks.

Then they hired me.

I brought six men, quiet and deadly as arctic ice. The quiet was our failing, had we come up through the woods like we belonged there, he probably would have put it down to the bears that ran through there, noisy animals they are. Stealth alerted him. The silence and the void were his heart. He made it his time. He killed my best man with a blade in close combat, cut his throat right to bone.

The second was luckier, in some small sense. He smashed my friend's hand with a club against a tree. Absinthe rewarded him by tearing out his throat with his teeth.